OK, I’ve always had trouble with this idea. As far as I’ve ever known, when you drop ice in a glass of water, the ice already displaces an amount of water equal to the amount of water in the ice. So as it melts, it won’t cause the water to suddenly overfull the glass. So what’s different about the polar ice that makes it so that it will raise the sea level if it’s already floating in the sea to begin with?
In: Planetary Science
The problem is that there’s a lot of ice that is actually sitting on land, that will melt and flow into the sea, ADDING water to the oceans. Greenland contains enough land ice to raise the sea level by about 20 feet and Antarctica has enough ice to raise it by another 190 feet. Again, this is not ice that is floating in the sea, like an iceberg, but ice that is sitting on land, like a glacier.
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